


Deep Breath In, Deep Breath Out

by nostalgicatsea



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Family Dinners, Gen, Introspection, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:55:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicatsea/pseuds/nostalgicatsea
Summary: Family dinners were for other people, other times, Sharon thought. Not for people like Natasha and her and not when half the universe was gone. But it felt right being here, strange as it was being in Tony's home.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Sharon Carter & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Sharon Carter & Natasha Romanov, Sharon Carter & Tony Stark
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20
Collections: Marvel Trumps Hate 2019





	Deep Breath In, Deep Breath Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishipallthings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishipallthings/gifts).



> This ended up being harder to write than I thought, especially as it went in directions I didn't expect, but it was a challenge that I appreciated. Jen, thanks for being so patient, taking a chance on me for a character I hadn't written before (Sharon! And Morgan, now that I think about it, but she was unplanned), and being a wonderful friend and co-mod!

Over the years, Sharon had been to many unexpected places. An underground bunker in the Amazonian jungle. An orphanage on the outskirts of Minsk. Even, like something straight from the stories that she read and watched as a kid, where good and bad were unambiguous and nothing lay between the two sides, a secret evil lair on a private island near the equator. There had been no other way to describe that place, but she had kept the thought to herself. 

But a rustic house by a lake upstate owned by her cousin—was that even the right term for Tony? Was there even a word for her great-aunt’s godson whom she might have grown up with had it not been for their age difference but later reconnected with as adults?—felt the most unexpected of all. Sharon didn't know what it said about her that something so domestic sat on the same shelf as every other place she had been to as a SHIELD, then CIA, then Joint Terrorism Task Force agent. 

Only when Tony called did it occur to her that she hadn’t sat down for a family dinner or been invited to one since Aunt Peggy moved to the nursing home and she went off to college. 

She either ate meals alone in her apartment or elsewhere with colleagues, superiors, or marks, always for business when it was the latter. Whatever this was, it wasn’t that even if Tony had given that as a pretext for inviting Natasha and her to dinner at the end of their call earlier.

“Take a break,” Tony had cajoled before adding, as if hearing the irony of his words and sensing their hesitation as he spoke, “We can talk shop over some pasta just as well as we can over the phone. Sources tell me that Natasha's been subsisting on whatever’s left in the back of the pantry that hasn’t expired yet.”

A door had appeared that hadn’t been there before. Tony turned the knob and left it ajar, and Natasha pushed it open the rest of the way. “Cooking’s covered in spy school, but we’ll be there. Text me the address,” she said evenly, and that had been that. Or had been on Tony’s end.

No errant note had crept into Natasha’s voice, but Sharon had been next to her and caught the way she sat up a fraction, hope burning in her eyes. She had wondered if Natasha had gotten rusty at hiding her emotions with no one to see her at the compound anymore or Natasha trusted her enough to let her guard down. To show that she was capable of want.

 _Maybe both_ , she had thought.

With Fury and Hill gone, Sharon was the only non-Avenger left on their side who knew how much the Avengers meant to Natasha in a personal capacity. An outsider who understood what had happened, a witness to the schism that stayed open like a canyon. Sometimes Sharon felt like a ferryman, the only one who knew how to operate the squeaky, rickety shuttle that crossed that chasm hundreds of feet in the air, taking a passenger from one side to the other because no one could stay on the opposite side for too long. 

And now here they were.

“Bucatini all’amatriciana,” Tony greeted them, walking backwards and pointing an oil-damp spatula at them.

The words were foreign to her, not only because they were but also because she had forgotten what it was like to walk into a home that was lived in.

It was almost too much noise, the murmur of the TV floating indistinctly towards them, rhythmic chops against a cutting board reaching them from a short distance.

Tony didn’t seem to notice, expertly weaving his way past toys strewn on the floor and narrowly escaping a pile of Legos. “Pep’s in the kitchen. Listen, you get Morgan and work on dessert. Otherwise, Pepper will stress out about how dinner isn’t ready yet.” He raised his voice. “Maguna! Honey, come over here. You can make cookies now.”

A patter of feet and then suddenly, Tony’s big eyes in an impossibly tiny face. 

Morgan stopped and stared at Natasha and her from a few feet away. Cartoonish explosions and cheerful music erupted in the background; she had forgotten to turn off the TV in her hurry. 

“Are you Natasha?” she asked, eyes round.

Natasha’s grip on the Tupperware she was carrying tightened for an instant. She had confessed on the drive over, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, that she hadn’t seen Tony in person since he recovered enough to leave the compound. Business calls were fine, but nothing more than that between the two of them. Tony meticulously drew a line between work and his personal life, not out of any caution or hatred but a polite, dispassionate disinterest in being anything more than colleagues again. She and Natasha had heard of Pepper and Tony’s marriage and their daughter’s birth, of course, but it was through bland press statements that briefly noted that it was a small, private ceremony and gave Morgan’s name and the date they welcomed her into the world. They had gotten little more than that in the ensuing years. 

Sharon had always assumed that the separation between business and home went both ways, but Morgan’s question and her expectant expression said differently.

Natasha’s face was doing something complicated, but thankfully Tony had slipped away to the kitchen already. “Yes,” she answered, more cautiously than Sharon knew she would have wanted to sound. 

Morgan scrunched up her nose. “Daddy said you had fire truck hair. But your hair’s like his armor.”

Sharon stepped forward, sensing that Natasha had been shoved onto a lake of ice, spinning over a surface that could splinter at any moment. 

“Hey Morgan, your dad said something about cookies? Want to go make some?” She extended her hand, balancing the cake box she had on her other palm, and marveled at the easy trust with which Morgan took it. “I’m Sharon.”

“I know.” Morgan tugged her hand, skipping as Sharon matched her pace. “D’you like chocolate chip? I wanna make a hundred of them.”

“That’s my favorite. But you’ll have to show me how because I haven’t made them in a long time."

Morgan brought the two of them into the dining room, where there were already ingredients laid out on the table, chattering without, it seemed, taking a breath. Sharon’s mind went blank, her thoughts scattering, as Morgan waved a pudgy hand at the recipe sheet on the table and rattled off the names of everything in front of them. She struggled to keep a grip on the thoughts that she had had ever since Tony had invited Nat and her to dinner up through actually arriving and being ushered in by an unexpectedly relaxed Tony. They were like balloons that she had let go of in surprise, their strings dancing out of reach.

She wondered if that was the point, watching as Natasha composed herself and put a kind, indulgent smile on, one that no one, save Barton’s kids, might have ever seen. Tony had said they were on dessert duty because dinner wasn’t ready yet, but everything Sharon knew about Pepper Potts indicated that Pepper would have never let that happen. 

This way, they didn't have to march straight into sitting around the table, making awkward small talk, or standing stiffly to the side, waiting as Tony and Pepper assembled all the dishes. That had been why Natasha scrambled to cobble something together and agreed to stop by a bakery on the way over; if anything, they had, however boring potato salad and cake were as conversation starters, a topic to talk about. 

And maybe it was a matter of trust, Sharon mused as Morgan got onto a chair and sat up on her knees, leaning as close to Natasha as she could without knocking into Natasha’s elbow. 

_Agent Romanoff. Romanoff. Widow_ , Tony would call Nat, first brusquely and then tepidly and then, in recent months, something close to fondly again even as he kept them at arms’ length. 

“Natasha,” Morgan had said.

“I dunno if this’ll make a hundred,” Morgan said now, skeptically peeking into the bowl as she handed Natasha sugar, doing her best not to spill any. 

“No? What if we made them really, really small?”

“Noooo,” Morgan dragged out her refusal, flopping onto her side on the table and nearly knocking over the eggs that Natasha deftly moved away from her in a flash.

“I think we can even make two hundred if we make them so tiny you need a magnifying glass,” Natasha said with a straight face.

“No, small cookies are only for ants! Uncle Happy told Mommy that.” She frowned before adding “I’m not an ant” so declaratively that Natasha and Sharon laughed.

At the sound, Natasha met her glance over Morgan’s head, surprised as if remembering there was someone else in the room. Warmth sparked in her eyes and Sharon was struck by the realization that she had forgotten Natasha once looked like that, four years ago or even longer, years before the Decimation even. 

Sharon squeezed Morgan’s shoulder as Morgan rotated onto her back to see them. “Well, it’s a good thing we brought chocolate cake then, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Cake!” Morgan exclaimed, sitting up instantly, and the warmth stayed there as Natasha laughed again, this time her gaze steady on Sharon as Sharon felt her mouth go crooked, goofy, and almost unfamiliar with a smile of her own. 

Later, after dinner, Sharon joined Natasha out on the porch. Morgan had gotten fussy, bored as the adults put out board games, and she and Natasha had agreed to watch her as she tried to capture fireflies outside. Sharon crossed her arms on top of the porch railing, leaning against it as they watched a small figure in the twilight run through the grass. 

“Why do you think he invited us?” Natasha asked. It was the same unspoken question they had had at the compound after they had hung up, the one that sat like a dense fog in the car on the shorter-than-expected trip to Tony’s house. This time, though, there was none of that heaviness, only a wisp of mild curiosity. The answer wouldn’t change anything, and while that might not have been comforting to know on the drive over, it was now.

Tony had wanted them here. There was no trick. No test. If there was, they had passed simply by being present and that was all that mattered. 

“I don’t know. Maybe FRIDAY alerted him that you didn’t have anything in the fridge, and he didn’t want you to starve,” Sharon replied.

“Steve comes by _one_ time when I’m eating cup ramen, and you guys don’t let it go.” 

“He told me there was nothing but one pantry shelf stocked with it. We were concerned. Which reminds me, he asked me to check that you’re alive and report on your status.” 

But it was a lie. Sharon hadn’t talked to Steve in weeks; she still traveled for work while he stayed put in Brooklyn, and their lives had completely diverged. She tried to remember the last time they spoke, in person or over text, and gave up. She should reach out to him again while she was in New York or at least stateside for the next two months, though she wouldn’t mention this part of her visit with Natasha to him.

She already knew how he would react if she did. “That’s good. I’m happy that you guys got to spend time,” he would say charitably and mean it, because he wanted that for them, for the Avengers too, but he was always so bad at keeping his emotions off of his face. It was the exact same way he reacted when Tony and Pepper’s wedding had been mentioned in the news, which none of them had been invited to except Banner, Rhodes, and Hogan. 

Steve wasn’t a good liar unless he was lying to himself.

“Maybe this is Tony’s way of trying to nudge us towards moving on. That there’s more to life than what we’re doing. There’s this.” Natasha waved a hand in front of her. 

“You got the talk from Steve too, didn’t you?”

Natasha smirked. “Once directly, but he’s found other ways to bring it up obliquely.”

The truth was she and Natasha didn’t know how to stop, not when there was so much to do. The other truth was with such little manpower and so much confusion, there were long lulls where there was nothing to do. 

“Yeah, he brought up learning to play the piano in my spare time because I mentioned it once in passing that it would be nice to. I told him it’s kind of hard to when you’re jumping from place to place.”

The third truth: Steve had a point. Life went on and maybe the best thing to do would be to move with it, to adjust to the new state of things. She was so used to silence, to devastation. Stadiums crumbling and sitting vacant like the amphitheaters and coliseums of centuries past. Half of Manhattan rotting in its abandonment, worse than it had in the seventies. Everywhere she went, now that four years had gone by and the initial cacophony of the first few months—screams, sirens, loud riots and searches for lost ones and crying and accusations—had dialed down, Sharon marveled at the emptiness. In most places than not, she felt like she was one of the few handfuls of survivors in the world, rather than one of the billions still left. 

Tonight had been different. Among the rubble, people set their dinner tables, visited their friends, and gathered around the TV as a family. It was no different than what she had seen before in regions of civil unrest and war before the Decimation, but somehow she had forgotten the human desire for normalcy and the necessity of it, forgotten about resilience.   
  
Tonight, she was reminded more than ever that life went on, but this time the reminder didn’t sting. It revitalized her instead, even if it didn’t lessen the grief of an entire half of a universe lost, Fury and Hill and Sam and the rest. 

Maybe that was the point. 

Thanos had tried to burn down the universe, but already there was life, ever irrepressible, growing in the ashes he left behind, young shoots springing up from what everyone had seen as dead, infertile ground. So much was lost, but there were still things here worth fighting for. 

So when Natasha inquired, dryly because she knew the answer already, “You ever think of stopping?” Sharon knew what to say about that and the whole evening. 

_No_ , she thought because it wasn’t about stopping, not when Tony knew they could never stop. Work had always been Sharon’s life, and it was easy even when it wasn’t, when everything fell away but what needed to be done. There was an end point, however convoluted and opaque the path was to that finish line, and then another end point after that. It was what fueled her, other than knowing that if you could do what was necessary, you had a duty to do so instead of waiting around to see if someone else would do the job.

“Eyes on the prize, this one,” Aunt Peggy used to say about her, and that focus got Sharon through school and training to where she wanted to be and made her get up and hit the ground running again whenever something tripped her.

But it also meant that she didn’t know what to do when there wasn’t a goal in sight, when there was nothing to lock her aim on. And as more time passed since the Snap, it was like she stared at the target for so long that she was no longer able to see it clearly, like the scope of her rifle had gotten clouded.

“No,” she said out loud, “but it’s not about stopping. That’s not what this was about.” 

It was a matter of recalibration. Of taking a deep breath and focusing. Of taking stock of their surroundings and what they had.

She thought that Natasha needed this tonight as much as she did and she would get it if it came from her because they were too alike in this way. It was why she was with Natasha at the compound in the first place, and it was why she was with her here. She turned, only to find Natasha in the same pose, cheek resting on elbow on porch railing, back curved, so they were two sides of a parabola. 

“Then what is it about?” 

“It’s about knowing who this is for. It’s not just the dead,” Sharon said. She tilted her head to the fields, redirecting Natasha’s attention to where Morgan crouched over the jar that she set on the grass, twisting the lid shut. “It’s the living we’re fighting for too. We can give them a better world than this.”

She sensed the change as she spoke, disjointed bits oiled and eased back into place inside of Natasha as she took in Sharon’s words. As they heard Morgan, who knew nothing else but this half-world, whose norm was ghosts and shades of what once was, call their names.

Natasha straightened up, raising a hand in reply before turning to Sharon, giving her answer to a question that Sharon hadn’t realized she had asked.

“We will,” she said, calm and with conviction, and they watched as Morgan got up and ran to them, gold flickering inside her glass jar, bright reminders of life blinking in and out in the fallen dark on their shared breaths.


End file.
